"On Saturday, the 16th of this month, they were ordered to assemble in front of the buildings where they lived at 4 o'clock p.m.. They thought a census was going to be taken. They had not been ordered to bring anything with them, and so--although it was a Saturday--some of the considered it unsuitable to wear their best Sabbath clothes. They went out in their everyday work clothes, thereby wishing to demonstrate the extent of their loyalty. They were placed in the center of the field, in a very small area, and segregated according to the letters that they had received during their recent medical examinations. Thus, people with the letter 'A' and those who possessed working papers were ordered to pass to one side, while the unfit, the aged, the sick, the children, and those marked with the letter 'B' were placed on the other side. Shocking scenes were played out there, for children were not allowed to go to persons in group 'A', infants were torn from mothers, children ran crying and screaming around the field looking for their parents, while their parents, unable to regard these scenes with composure, beseeched the guards to allow them to take their children with them. In response, they were shoved back, their children were torn from their arms and thrown to the grass like balls, and even thrown over the fence. They remained on that field until evening; it was a day of heavy rains and they were all drenched to the marrow, not to mention the fact that they hadn't even had a drink of water since they had left their houses. In the evening, they were informed that they were leaving for Litzmannstadt-Getto, while those unfit to work and marked with the letter 'B', as well as the children, had been loaded onto peasant wagons and taken away in a different direction, to parts that remain unknown." (from Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto)

It is *everybody*'s job to make sure that scene is *never* played out ever again--mine, yours, Ms. Goldfuss. Nothing like that scene, nothing approaching that scene, and nothing that might lead us on the road down to that scene. I will stand in front of bullets before my tax dolllars support that. Saying "It's not the job of border officials(ICE) to do that, it becomes the job of DHS" or any mention of "Obama started it blah blah" is a facile attempt at misdirection.

The only function "money" provides is to decide who gets how much stuff. In the past, you got two pieces of nice bread while I only got one piece of crappy bread because you had more "money". Today we've evolved to the point where it's more a question of you get two flat-screen TVs while I only get one because you have more "money" (only talking about first-world economies, obviously). If we're at the point where everybody can have as many digital watches as they want, it'll no longer be a question of money, it'll be a question of socialization: "Dude, do you really need fourteen watches?"

Once money is removed from the equation, it's obvious that the only reason most people work is for the money. So, yes, most people will retreat into the holodeck, never to be seen again. How is that different from what they do today? They're wage slaves for eight hours, and then they go home to consume media for the rest of the day.

The best benefit from all that, in my mind, is that we'll no longer have crappy doctors (or engineers or waitresses or movie directors) who just got into it for the money. The only people working jobs will be the ones who really love driving trucks (or playing baseball or making furniture), and the no-love, no-talent losers will *get out of the way* and clear the field for those with a calling.

The barycenter of the Sun and Jupiter is above the surface of the sun, does that mean we'd have to reclassify our solar system as a binary star system now? http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/bar...

Then why is it that that here on /. a universal complaint is when "the MBA's showed up and optimized everything for cashflow and the company went to pot"? It's because those "MBA's" took away whatever traces of things like autonomy, master and purpose were there and replaced them with purely financial considerations, and IT folks *HATE* that.

Exactly zero of the great engineers I've worked with showed up in the morning and said "today I'm going to earn 1/365 of my annual salary therefore today I'm going to kick ass and produce some serious good product." On the contrary, they showed up every morning and kicked ass and produced great product BECAUSE THEY COULD KICK ASS AND PRODUCE GREAT PRODUCT, because they company was a space where they could do that.

Honestly, all the posts on this thread saying "IT'S THE MONEY" are smoking dope. If you take blasé, disenchanted engineers pay them more, all you get is overpaid blasé, disenchanted engineers.

Jeez, has nobody linked to this already? Here's NORML's point-by-point carefully reasoned response to the White House: http://blog.norml.org/2011/10/29/white-house-response-to-normls-we-the-people-marijuana-legalization-petition/#more-7406

Highlights:

“Addiction” links to a NIDA page noting the lifetime dependence rate of cannabis to be 9% – that is, 9 in 100 people who try cannabis will develop a dependence. Kerlikowske does not mention that caffeine has the same 9% rate, alcohol is a 15% rate, and tobacco is a 32% rate

“Respiratory disease” links to a 2008 Science Daily article on a study entitled “Bullous Lung Disease due to Marijuana” which looked at the cases of ten people who came in already complaining of lung problems, who admitted they smoked pot over a year.

“Cognitive impairment” links to a 1996 NIDA fact sheet on studies of cognitive impairment involving card sorting. Since then A 2001 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found chronic users who quit for a week “showed no significant differences from control subjects”. A 2002 clinical trial published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal determined, “Marijuana does not have a long-term negative impact on global intelligence.”

And it goes on and on. Jeez, the informational content of Chief Kerlikowske's report really is close to zero, isn't it?